Democrats face law and order dilemma

Last week there was a feverish debate following Hillary Clinton’s rhetorical acrobatics over proposals to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Yet it’s the uniform backing of this policy by the leading Democratic presidential candidates that may prove more foreboding for liberals in the general election.

The rising American discontent with illegal immigration has the potential to sever Democrats from the majority of voters — especially those in the working and middle class — like no issue has in four decades.

Story Continued Below

During the mid-1900s, Hubert Humphrey was one of the toughest anti-crime mayors in America. But by the 1968 presidential campaign both Republican Richard Nixon and independent George Wallace were viewed as more capable than the Democratic nominee of doing the “best job in handling law and order,” according to a poll that year.

Another survey found that urban upheaval was considered a top concern by nearly as many Americans as the war in Vietnam.

Now some Democrats are accusing Republicans of demagogy over illegal immigration. Liberals tried a similar strategy in 1968 over riots, crime and racial unrest. While there may have been merit to some of these charges, it was Democrats who ended up paying a political price.

Democrats in 1968 focused heavily on courting the black vote, then roughly one in 10 voters. There was a sense that Democrats could not emphasize curtailing riots and rising crime without devaluing hard-won gains in civil rights.

Liberals rightly emphasized the problem of rampant police abuse. But they glossed over the fact that lawlessness was increasingly defining American life — between 1960 and 1972, the violent crime and robbery rate tripled and the aggravated assault, rape and murder rates all doubled.

Republicans focused on urban upheaval as a campaign issue when Democrats would not, and they found a way to reach white working- and middle-class voters.

Today Democrats are focused on courting Hispanics, who made up an estimated 8 percent of the presidential vote in 2004.

Conventional wisdom has it that Republicans will slip into permanent minority party status if they fail to woo Hispanics, which critics suggest means softening the party’s traditional hard-line stance on immigration.

That could very well happen in three decades, as demographic trends continue to slip away from the GOP.

But Democrats have more to lose in the short term over the immigration issue. After all, the vast majority of blacks (76 percent) and whites (86 percent) oppose issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, an October CNN/Opinion Research poll found.

And when a recent Gallup Poll asked Americans what the “top priorities” of the president and Congress should be, combating illegal immigration was topped only by dealing with the war in Iraq.

The real problem for Democrats, however, is that the very voters they need to win back are most concerned over immigration.

Veteran liberal strategists Stan Greenberg, Al Quinlan and James Carville reported last week their finding that the “top issue underlying the discontent” for independent voters is that U.S. borders have been “left unprotected.”

There was no close second. Twice as many independent voters cited border security as a bigger problem than Iraq.

The Democrats’ dilemma goes even deeper as Republicans increasingly tie other, seemingly unrelated, problems of public concern to immigration. Fair or not, drug trafficking and weapons smuggling will be linked rhetorically to an unsecured border with Mexico.

This may seem the stuff of Washington framing wars. But to many Americans the issue is real, often linked to economic anxiety.